There’s a famous metaphysical phrase I think of often:

KNOW THYSELF

The words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi.

To recognize who you are beyond conditioning: societal influence, personality, and your wounds.

I often say,

Your personality is not your soul.

I also see people’s personalities getting in the way of their growth.

KNOW THYSELF

means to connect with yourself on the level of essence, consciousness, soul, and spirit.

What that often means is grappling with imprints that were put upon you, but were never yours to hold. It means looking at your shadow: the parts of yourself you avoid by projecting it on others, or through judgment of others.

I’ll use a shadow work story I shared with the last Secret Studies Cohort that landed. In my own process, I looked at a few other writers, artists, and teachers I was jealous of. What they all had in common that I was jealous of was that everything they did appeared incredibly easy. Remember that none of this was true. I do not know for a fact that what they offered was easy to make; I made up a story about this. We do this ALL the time: interpret our stories and projections as facts! To set ourselves up to what? FEEL BAD! LOL

Now, I had dreamed of having things be easy for years. Everything, everything, EVERYTHING I did seemed to be hard. Unnecessarily so, ridiculously so!

To break a pattern using shadow work, you need to dive deep and you need to be open. I asked my partner why he thought things were more difficult for me.

You like it. You don’t like doing simple, easy things because you get bored. You enjoy a challenge, complexity, and succeeding at hard things.

Hmmmm. I didn’t love that answer, but ok. I could admit my ADHD did like the cortisol that overcoming a complicated challenge could give me.

I asked myself:
Where did this story around difficulty begin?

And like a firework exploding in my brain, everything made sense.

Since I was a child, one of the most frequent words a parent used to describe me was difficult. If I had a dollar for every time that word was lobbed at me, I’d be a millionaire.

And what did my impressionable psyche do?

Became difficult. Feisty. Contrary.
(I had to, to survive in my home, tbh.)

Our psyches also need to find positive ways to present our shame, so I chased after difficult goals and immersed myself in difficult environments and thrived. Smith College. A grueling Masters. Corporate America with 80 hour weeks. Starting my own business. I needed to have some kind of pride about this shameful aspect of myself.

The shadow always functions this way. In duality.
In a non-dualistic world, it must be both, or our egos will collapse.

My child self needed to believe that I was the problem, because I had to survive: understanding a caretaker as a harm-doer would annihilate my precarious sense of safety.

My subconscious belief ran the difficulty pattern in my life until the day I decided it would not. Until the day I realized that this part of my personality was not only non-consensual, but it wasn’t real. I was no longer willing to believe in this, so I was no longer interested in feeding this belief in thought and actions.

The truth is, I was never a difficult person naturally.
At the end of the day, I want everyone happy, fed, cared for, and comfortable.
And I’ll do what I can to make this happen.

I just happened to be born to immature people who needed to make me the problem to absolve themselves from accountability.

Being called difficult for years became part of my personality and experience.
I didn’t question it, and so the pattern played itself out over and over.
Until it didn’t.

Then relationships and circumstances got easier for me.
When I told this story in the course, a lot of folks related.
Their story was specific to them.

They were the “sensitive one” who got ridiculed for it.
The “good one,” that no one ever had to worry about.
The smart one, the dumb one, the forgotten one, the failure to launch, the loser, the responsible one.
Truth is, we are all these parts and also so much more.
Our intuition is here to show us the “much more” parts of us.

In Secret Studies: Intuition, we have themed months. One of those themes is Truth Month. That’s the month where you get really honest about some aspects of your conditioning, and what you really want. You allow yourself to admit certain things that might feel taboo.

Or, you allow yourself to admit simple facts that when acknowledged, can help you meet your needs more.

Your intuition can’t come through clearly when there are lots of false narratives swirling around you. What is meant to be yours will be yours when you are honest about what you need and want, honest about who you need to be to get it, and honest about how your shadow material has been blocking you.

Now, I know this sounds intense!
Shadow work is truth, and truth by its very nature can feel intense.
You don’t have to go there if you don’t want to.
The course is structured to meet you exactly where you are, and at exactly the capacity you have right now. That’s what you run everything through.
Truth month, for you, could simply mean admitting you don’t like late nights anymore, and so you aren’t going to go out past 9pm.

You make the prompts whatever you want them to be.